One or more interior lighting fixtures are typically mounted or suspended from a ceiling for illuminating a room, and in particular, a work space. Nonuniform illumination of the room can effect the visual comfort of occupants, and in particular, effect the productivity of workers.
For example, differences in brightness or luminance of portions of the room in one's visual field are interpreted as visual information. Too high a contrast (e.g., the degree of difference between light and dark) leads to the reception of non-useful information and/or information overflow that disturbs one's natural perception. Such disturbance has to be continuously ignored which can lead to eye strain, headaches, and other problems.
In addition, with the computer becoming a standard office tool, the need to provide proper illumination has become more important. For example, improper interior lighting often results in glare and/or reflections on a computer monitor. The reflected areas of light, as well as dark areas, due to the surrounding walls, ceiling, and the lighting fixture itself, are visually distracting.
One approach for providing a generally uniformly illuminated room is to provide a backlit ceiling. However, such a backlit ceiling is expensive, typically extends over the entire ceiling surface, and inhibits installation of other equipment below the ceiling.
Another approach for providing a generally uniformly illuminated room is to use indirect lighting fixtures where generally more than ninety percent of the light from the lighting fixture is distributed upwardly towards the ceiling, from which it is diffusely reflected. A drawback with this approach is that the lighting fixture, and in particular the housing of the lighting fixture, shows up as a silhouette against the illuminated ceiling undesirably causing the same effect as having dark areas on the ceiling. Suspending indirect lighting fixtures from the ceiling also increase the silhouetting effect. In addition, with compact indirect lighting fixtures, the performance thereof is sacrificed due to the reduced size and areas to redirect light.
Therefore, there is a need for a low-cost, compactly configured, low-contrast, interior lighting fixture wherein the interior lighting fixture is configured to provide a generally uniformly illuminated body so that the observed visual contrast of the interior lighting fixture and the observed visual contrast between the interior lighting fixture and the environment such as the ceiling or wall of the room, office, etc. is minimized.